


Sometimes

by Mizzy



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Community: i-reversebang, Crack, Electrocution, Fluff and Crack, M/M, Nonsense, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Ridiculous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-26 12:29:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2652113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizzy/pseuds/Mizzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur and Eames have a long-running game trying to hack each other's totem. Like a lot of things, it's not as funny as Eames thinks it is. Meanwhile, Cobb and Ariadne have spent too much time together, Saito continues to buy everything, and Yusuf is a maltreated supervillain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lauand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauand/gifts).



> THIS IS A PINCH HIT SO I AM BLAMELESS FOR EVERYTHING, THAT'S HOW IT WORKS, RIGHT??!
> 
> Thank you to Keptein for the last-minute beta when my original beta fell through (a hole? she probably fell through a hole. I reckon it was a hole. MayBE A PLot hoLE. ANYWAY, THANK YOU CAP KEP! ♥)
> 
> Lauand! I hope this fits your image. ♥
> 
> #

** Sometimes **

_A question that sometimes drives me hazy:_

_am I or are the others crazy?_

Albert Einstein

 

** Ariadne **

"Sometimes I love the time disparity between different levels of the dream," Ariadne sighs, kicking her heels against the counter she's sitting on. She squints up at the nearest clock, a boring piece with black roman numerals on a white face, and she sees the seconds tick by slow, like they're dragging. "Other times, not so much."

Ariadne can only see Eames’s tight smile vaguely, by the way his cheek creases up and forms patches of color in the reflection of the cool metal wall he is facing. "It's one of the downsides of Arthur taking point on a dream. One has to make one's _own_ entertainment." He continues prodding at the wall.

"What've you found?" Ariadne asks, jumping down from the counter and ignoring the projection that turns to look at her curiously. The projection only glances towards them for a second before turning back to his newspaper; they still have plenty of time before Arthur's subconscious starts swarming in to try and rip them limb from limb.

This time Eames turns his face to flash a grin at her. It's full of barely-restrained mischief. "We, my pet, are misbehaving."

"I nearly castrated the last guy who called me pet," Ariadne says, tapping the point on her thigh where she has a machete strapped to her. Eames surreptitiously crosses his legs at the knees and turns back to the wall; even though he knows injuries in the dream don't translate to real life, sometimes one can't hide such an innate reaction.

"Ah, panel 283. Here we go," Eames says, sounding satisfied as he levers part of the seamless-looking wall open to reveal a safe door. He hums happily under his breath and produces what looks like a junked-up version of a stethoscope. "I hand-made the original one of these myself when I was fourteen. Always did the trick until Vegas corrupted safe-makers worldwide, made you need DNA and voice-recognition software to crack them." He slips the earbuds in and locks the device to the door of the safe. "Luckily for me, Arthur's old-fashioned."

"Arthur—" Ariadne starts, confused, and then awareness dawns. "This is _his_ safe? For his secrets?"

"It's automatic," Eames says, tilting his head and turning the dial, looking pleased with himself. "We can't help but bury our secrets subconsciously in the levels we design. Extractors are savvier than most, tend to hide them in vaults, in secret hidey-holes or—" He gestures. "In wall safes, if you're dull."

"Just as soon as I think I've got dreamsharing figured out," Ariadne sighs. "Should you be doing that? Aren't his secrets, well, secret?" A worse thought occurs. "Have you ever broken into _my_ secrets?" Her chest pangs a little. She's not so sure what would be in there. Proof she cheated on a third grade math quiz? Those photos she sent to Kacy last summer which Ariadne swore must never see the light of day again? Her gran's secret cookie recipe?

"Dreamsharing as a team is a fragile balance," Eames says, turning the dial in the other direction. "We must be able to trust each other."

Ariadne gives him a deadpan look.

Eames glances over, catches it, and rolls his eyes. "I'm not _maliciously_ looking, Ariadne. It's a game Arthur and I play."

"Most people play monopoly."

"Most people are deathly boring," Eames says, flashing her a grin, while Ariadne tries to work out whether she counts as most people and if she should be reacting to the insult. "We've been trying to scope out each other's totem for _years_ now."

"Each other's totem?" Ariadne can feel her eyebrows lurch higher without even consciously moving them. Sometimes the dream makes her feel like a cartoon.. "But what if you get it? Isn't that super dangerous?"

"Relax, young grasshopper," Eames says, grinning in success as the dial clicks for a last time and the door fluidly falls open, revealing a red die sat innocently in the middle of the empty dark space of the wall safe, "it's just a bit of fun."

A second later, as Eames reaches for the die, his whole body spasms and jerks and he slams backwards, holding onto his hand and hissing. In among Eames' cursing are words like _electrified?_ and _owowow_ and _little bastard!_

"Yup," Ariadne says, looking in on Arthur's booby-trapped totem with approval as Eames hops around in pain beside her, "just a bit of fun."

 

** Yusuf **

"You are both quite ridiculous," Yusuf says, arching an unimpressed eyebrow in Arthur's direction. "And that's all I'll say on the matter."

Arthur sends him a rueful sort of expression, which Yusuf probably deserves, because they’ve already spent a whole hour talking about this foolhardy game he's playing with Eames.

Totems aren't to be messed with. Yusuf doesn't know personally what it's like to have your totem hacked; he doesn't much bother with dreams unless he really has to. But he has plenty of experience of having to pay his cleaning team more to bleach out a cot in his dream den when one of his regulars has dreamed themselves into a vegetative state. Those kind of bodily-fluid stains are hard to get out of fabric, and drooling idiots are bad for business.

"He started it," Arthur says, carefully cupping the poker chip and using the laser meter to measure the angle it leans, before pulling out a case of chemicals, neatly labeled in small glass bottles.

" _Careful,_ " Yusuf says, sitting up straighter and leaning closer, itching to take the chemicals out of the hands of someone untrained, "a totem can be exquisitelybalanced to the senses of the owner. One minute, tiny change can convince a dreamer that it is not their totem, and thus they must be dreaming. Can you tell me you'd be entirelyhappy if Mr. Eames stepped into traffic in front of you?"

"Of course not," Arthur says promptly, and Yusuf breathes a sigh of relief, because it's nice to know the people you trust with your life on a frequently recurring basis are not entirelyinsane. "If he did it in front of me, there'd probably be CCTV cameras recording the incident; that would lead to police checking the footage, and I make it a habit never to let my face be caught on film. Especially not by any government agency."

Yusuf tries not to cry. He really does.

"Are you going to sit there looking constipated, or are you going to help me figure out how Eames' totem works?" Arthur demands.

Yusuf sighs, but reaches out. Anything to stop Arthur playing with chemicals he doesn't understand.  "How did you even manage to get this from him, anyway?" Yusuf asks. Eames' personal possessions are usually impossible to retrieve.

Arthur just looks up at Yusuf over the chip and smiles. He might think it looks innocent, but Yusuf thinks the smile makes him very much resemble a shark.

"…I'll not ask," Yusuf finishes. Arthur's shark-smile widens.

The smile falls later, when Eames walks in, takes one look at Arthur and Yusuf bending over the small poker chip, and starts laughing, before he reaches over and deposits a small pile of the poker chips on top of the first one.

Eames grins at Arthur, before walking off and whistling casually, while Arthur turns red and fumes silently down at the pile of poker chips.

"How sure are you that you stole the correct one?" Yusuf asks.

Arthur continues to glare.

"You've already taken seven hours to examine the first one," Yusuf continues. "Do you even have time to examine the whole pile?"

Arthur turns his glare upwards, towards Yusuf.

"…I'll just sit over here and stay quiet," Yusuf says, holding up his hands and backing up. It seems like the safest option.

 

** Saito **

Physically and sexually, Saito's young and healthy. Mentally, he's old and has to spend long hours resisting the urge to shuffle around one of his expensive apartments in slippers and nightclothes, paying a sniper to get rid of kids playing on his lawn.

Continuing to use the PASIV with Dom Cobb and his merry ragtag band of thieves and miscreants is a battle of Saito's internal wits and wills. Saito's biggest enemy, now that Robert Fischer has split his father's conglomerate into fifty disparate pieces, is his own mind.

Which is why he's rappelling down the side of a hotel much like the JW Marriot Marquis, although this version is split into five towers, like a giant hand reaching out of the ground to pluck the sun out of the sky. Saito owns the JW Marriot Marquis; he bought Marriot International last year when he was visiting Washington D.C. and needed a room to stay. Usually he uses the elevator to descend this many floors. It's _much_ neater than going down the side of the building with just Eames to help.

"No more jobs like this," Saito says, holding his back and wincing at the ache he can feel. It's not the ache of climbing down the outside of a dreamed-up 1,600+ floored hotel; it'll be the damned chair he sat down in before injecting the somnacin, and years of never learning to sit correctly. The ache is referring through the dream, translating itself into a throbbing pain. "I'm an old man."

"You're not that old," Eames laughs, continuing to climb down the building, bracing his feet on the glass and elbow-length leather gloves gripping a thick black rope that would never hold them in the real world but with the power of dreams can take them easily. "I stole your passport once to check your date of birth."

"You mean to steal my personal details," Saito says.

Eames doesn't deny it.

" _Mentally_ I'm a thousand years old," Saito reminds him.

Eames looks down, sends him a terse grin. "You look good for it, mate."

Saito resists the urge to preen. "Botox," he admits.

"Let me guess," Eames asks, finally stopping by one of the windows and pulling out a glass cutter from his belt. He latches it onto the window and starts to draw a circle large enough to climb through. "You bought a chain of plastic surgeons?"

"Just one plastic surgeon," Saito says. "Plus his team of nurses." He smiles at the memory. "Very pleasant nurses."

"I bet," Eames says, pulling at the glass cutter and just discarding it and the circle of window to one side. Saito follows the movement with his eyes for a second and tries to remember that it's not going to hit someone on the sidewalk below. Eames climbs through the hole first and then helps Saito through, disconnecting his harness for him so they can both lie on the carpet panting for breath for a few moments.

"Aren't we supposed to be helping Mr. Cobb train young Ariadne to protect her mind from rogue extractors?" Saito asks.

Eames shrugs. " _Supposed_ to. Such a tiresome phrase. We are doing something _entirely_ more fun, my boy."

"My boy," Saito repeats. "If I'm a boy, that must make you an embryo."

"I've considering using that as a term of endearment, but it doesn't quite have the right ring to it. I need new words. Ariadne's cutting my vocabulary down." Eames winces deeply. "Literally," he adds with a visible shudder that Saito realizes he doesn't want explained.

"So what are we doing," Saito glances across at Eames, " _embryo_?"

"Ugh," Eames says, "that is the weirdest nickname I've ever had. It may be the weirdest nickname _anyone_ has ever had."

"I've heard worse," Saito says, with a twitch of his own that Eames doesn't ask for the definition of. "The question still stands."

"The question? Oh. Yeah. I know we're not _actually_ three hundred meters from the ground, but my brain doesn't always translate that knowledge correctly." Eames starts to push himself to his feet. "We're stealing Arthur's totem. He usually keeps a safe in a _room_ called 283, but I'm betting it's in room 3 on _floor_ 283\. It's his birthday, you see."

"Uh," Saito says, like any of that makes sense (he gave up on Eames making sense _months_ ago), "why are we stealing from Arthur? And what's a totem?" He follows Eames to his feet, looking around the room as Eames heads over to a closet. When he opens it, there's a floor-to-ceiling wall vault in the space and Eames smiles triumphantly.

"We're stealing from Arthur because it's fun," Eames says, starting to turn the vault handle. "And we're stealing his _totem._ "

"His totem? I was unaware that Mr. Arthur had any particular religious or familial affiliation."

"Oh lord, no, that would require him having a heart," Eames says. "No, I meant a totem. An item you fashion in order to stop your brain from turning to mush when you're constantly jumping between dream and reality. You know, the thing you keep in a pocket that you can check to see if you're dreaming or awake."

Saito stares at him, wordlessly.

"The thing Dom Cobb forgot to tell you about," Eames realizes, turning on his heel and wincing at Saito. "Wow. That's harsh."

Saito glares at Eames as he explains the concept of totems and how they work. Eames, Saito decides, doesn't need to sound so flippant about it, nor so amused that Cobb had left Saito out of the very important loop.

He gets his revenge when Eames finally cracks into the vault, only to be confronted by a spray of poison that melts his face off, while Saito tries to remember why he continues to risk his sanity with these people. Maybe a break would be sensible.

 

** Cobb **

Dominic Cobb has a very long list of things he's done wrong during his dreamsharing career.

Not only allowing but _encouraging_ Eames to work with them several times despite Arthur's voluble dislike on the subject?

Yeah, that's definitely a premium regret right now, he thinks. How was he supposed to know that there was more than one wall safe hidden in the dream? Arthur was supposed to dream up _one_ for their client to drop all his secrets into.

Not two.

And especially not a second one filled with an electrified die.

If Cobb thinks about it too much, he might start to suspect that Eames deliberately led him to this wrong safe. Eames should probably be thankful that Cobb is too tired to think.

"That's _it,_ " Cobb explodes, thankfully only verbally. One he had been clocked in the face by Arthur's inner organs after a projection wielding an IED got too close; he's not keen to expose any of his team to the same experience. He can't afford the therapy bills. "Arthur, Eames, I don't care what game of one-upmanship that you play outside of work, but that's it. You're done playing them while we're on a job! This is it! The end _._ Call it a draw! When this is done, if you want to see a cent of this payout, you're going to apologize to each other for being complete imbeciles."

There's a good rhythm to his speech, he thinks. If nothing else, Arthur and Eames are good practice for Cobb. When James and Pip grow up, Cobb will already have all the skills he needs for dealing with hormonal teenagers.

Arthur and Eames glare at each other throughout the rest of the mission, but don't try and steal each other's totem. It's only outside the dream that the topic comes back up again, as Cobb and Ariadne tidy away the PASIV while Yusuf cleans up his chemicals. All three sneak glances as Arthur and Eames approach each other warily at the other side of the warehouse. Cobb isn't entirely sure that they're not going to kill each other.

The two stare at each other for a long moment, until Arthur huffs in annoyance that he has to start the conversation rolling.

"I guess you win, then," Arthur says, sadly. Also, quite loudly. Maybe he doesn't know how much voices carries in the warehouse. Maybe he just wants witnesses, just in case the apology turns into a fatal fistfight.

"Uh," Eames says, just as loudly, "much as I like to take credit for awesome things I haven't done, I really don't think I can on this one. Not when it's a blatant draw. How did you come to that conclusion?"

"You continue to _find_ mine in the dream," Arthur says. It would be almost sulky if he wasn't forcing himself to use his most professional tone. As it is, he's obviously having to physically restrain himself from kicking at the floor. "I haven't even gotten _near_ your totem."

Eames smiles wryly. "And that's the secret, love."

Arthur's perfectly manicured eyebrows knot together. "But—" he starts, and then can't come up with the end of the sentence; he forms his face into the question instead. "What—?"

Eames' wry smile widens. "When we're on the job, if you can't find something, who can?"

"If I can't find something," Arthur starts, incensed, "then it usually means that…" His voice slows down as he finishes, "…that there's nothing to be found." The question on his face fades away, turning into anger instead. "Just _how_ freaking stupid are you?"

Arthur clenches his fists like he's going to punch Eames. Ariadne starts forwards to break the fight up, but Cobb puts an arm on her shoulder, holding her back. Arthur doesn't hit Eames.

"Do I need it?" Eames asks. "With you there?"

"But," Arthur says, incoherently. "That— _You_ —?" He looks up at Eames like he's something new, something crazy, something… Cobb doesn't want to decipher. Because it reminds him a little of how he looked at Mal, once upon a time, and that wound will always be a little too raw to poke at. Arthur's voice is soft, uncertain, when he says, "You trust me that much?"

"More like… life without you in it seems somewhat pointless," Eames says, shrugging like it doesn't mean too much. "Who else in this world or the dream one would I antagonize if not you? Besides, you trust me with your sanity too."

"I do not," Arthur says, indignant.

"Then why would I know what number your die tips to?" Eames asks, folding his arms and glaring at him.

"You don't," Arthur says, but he sounds uncertain. "You don't," he reaffirms, more certain on the repeat.

Eames leans in and whispers something in Arthur's ear, too low for them to hear properly. Arthur's expression is slack as Eames pulls back, a smile on his face that ought to be smug, but just seems soft and fond.

" _How_?" Arthur says, staring and staring at Eames. "I was so _careful_. I kept it hidden, kept it safe—"

"Your decoy die, sure," Eames says. "But we hide our secrets in our subconscious, and the number was always there. The number of the football shirt you dreamed me into on the McCowan job. The hotel room you put us in last month on the Bruin extraction."

Arthur's voice hitches as he says, a little unsteadily, "The number of freckles on your nose."

"Thought so," Eames says, rocking on his heels a little, a bit of insufferable smugness creeping into his expression, because it _is_ Eames, after all. "I cold-read the number on you _years_ ago, my darling."

Arthur looks down, shy, ashamed. Eames reaches out with a finger, tilts his face up to his. "But—" Arthur starts, cheeks pink.

Eames stares directly into Arthur's eyes. "I promise you, Arthur. I have never and I will never use the knowledge against you. I don't intend on losing you. To anything. Let alone some dumb silver briefcase with a spindle of brain-sharing chemicals."

Arthur makes an incoherent noise in the back of his throat that Cobb can't decipher until he raises his face to Eames', until the two are kissing, Eames' hand sliding into the carefully trimmed hair at the nape of Arthur's neck, and Cobb has to fight hard to resist the urge to melt into the warehouse floor until he remembers it's real life and they're not dreaming. Melting isn't the most comfortable way to die in a dream; Cobb tends to have a phantom stomachache for days if he's melted himself in the PASIV.

Yusuf, Cobb and Ariadne all turn in unison when Eames' hands slide somewhere inappropriate, and Arthur just makes an encouraging sound rather than enforcing his usual professionalism.

"That was oddly sweet," Cobb says slowly, frowning like he's swallowed something sour, his forehead puckering with the effort.

"I think it was romantic," Ariadne sighs. "Stupid, especially on Eames' part, but romantic anyway."

"It's a pity it's all a lie," Yusuf sighs.

Ariadne and Cobb turn to Yusuf. Yusuf stares off into the distance, a faint smile on his face.

"Eames has six freckles on his nose," Yusuf says. "And Arthur's die turns to four. Eames keeps a poker chip in his inner jacket lower pocket that balances text down when you flip it." He looks serene as he rocks on his heels and he beams at Cobb and Ariadne like they should be proud of him. "I memorize everyone's totems for the inevitable day when all the criminals I work with try to turn me into the government for my illegal use of chemicals."

Ariadne and Cobb exchange a glance and head straight for the warehouse exit. Cobb's taught her well. He doesn't even need to see her face to know she's probably already copying him, silently contemplating how to make their next totems Yusuf-proof. Arthur's electrified booby-traps, Cobb thinks, might be a good starting point.

" _Hey._ Where are you going?" Yusuf calls after them. "Fine, leave me here alone to clean everything up, then. It's not like I'm a one-of-a-kind genius chemist who should be treated with love and respect, or anything!"

"Sometimes I love the disparate personalities of the people I work with," Cobb tells Ariadne, kicking the door open so they can escape from the chaos. "Other times," he sighs, "not so much."


End file.
